How to use
this curriculum
Pathways to an Empathy-Based Approach
"If I let you into my life, will you promise not to judge? If I let you into my life, will you not look at me with those forgiving eyes? Please just listen. Do not have sympathy for me, for your sympathy I do not need. Just know the words on this page [is] my life. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s my life."
These words, written by a woman in Riverhead Correctional Facility in the early 2000’s continue to resonate and haunt us, as we question how to use our empathy-based approach to move beyond judgment and punishment into a new space where the human spirit may be celebrated and people will be given second chances. A space where stories written from the heart will actually help judges to adjust their understanding and sentencing. Where written words might change, hearts, minds and policies, and change the lives of the writers along the way.
While the Herstory approach, based on passing along the dare to care has reached thousands over the course of nearly three decades, we are building this curriculum around work that started in 2005 as we began to work with women behind bars, first in one jail and then in another, until eventually we were working with incarcerated people of all genders, prison families, children of the incarcerated and people in re-entry. Read more about us...
The Dare to Care
Too often when someone is in jail, the first question that comes up is “What did that person do?” It comes up before that person is allowed a face or a voice or a story that is their own creation. In the case of women and gender nonconforming people especially—and beyond this for those coming from backgrounds of poverty, violence, and discrimination—we must train ourselves to reframe our questions, thinking from the onset “What happened to them? Who are they, and what can they teach us?”
What would happen if we were to make a commitment to linger until the story of each person impacted found its rightful space—resisting all temptations to rush toward resolutions, wisdom or repentance that might not yet (or ever) be part of their truth—what might we be able to learn from the process? What would happen if we were to welcome with wide open arms, not the stories we might wish for, but those that come out when we give the permission to drop all pretending? Could this make a difference?
Could the stories resulting from this process make a difference not only to those who find healing in bringing their past selves back to life on the page, but to a society that doesn’t know what to do with its own violence and pain?
While the direction “to love one’s inner child” has little meaning for those inexperienced in love, the dare to write about a past self so fully that another can inhabit your skin provides those who haven’t developed compassion for themselves a back-door entry into accepting the selves they have been.
That dare – “to help another person to truly care” – becomes doubly powerful when extended to those caught in the carceral ecosystem.
A Quick Walk Through
Making it Your Own
Preparation for how to use these materials can be done in a number of ways. It's very important for you to read a bit about the philosophy behind our pedagogy in which the creation of empathy in a stranger. The ways in which people absorb new approaches are very different. Some like to read about them, some would rather watch a video or listen to a podcast. We have set this website up to incorporate written versions of the Herstory stories over the years that you may download, print, share on screen if you're working in a setting where that is permitted, as well as videos of people reading their stories and talking about the process.
These are some of the main processes that you will need to engage in before facilitating a workshop:
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building that suitcase of stories
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reflecting on our own motives for doing the work
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thinking about how we're going to introduce ourselves to the participants
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understanding the context in which we're going to be working
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familiarizing oneself with the movement from thinking about if your words had the power to oral imagining of scenes to writing
You can work on these in any order, but they need to be done before day one of your workshop.
We have organized this curriculum into four units that will allow new facilitators—who are working on their own—to proceed with integrating some of the things we have discovered over the course of several decades at their own pace.
It is critical here to stress that in the collective process, each new person, each new group that grows out of the grass roots, plays only a small part in finding new solutions. It is with humbleness and reverence for those who have blazed the path in working with people in prison and those in the larger carceral ecosystem that we add our discoveries, inviting you to use what you wish and to take of them freely in your own way.
To best learn the Herstory Writers Network’s methodology, we recommend that you move through this curriculum in sequential order, chapter by chapter.
Chapter I: Before the Workshop
Chapter II: Let the Workshop Begin!
Chapter III: Stories in Evolution
If I let you into my life will you promise not to judge?
Sustaining longer stories
Working with serious trauma/ Recovering the light inside
Where angels fear to tread/ Reflection/ Responsibility and remorse
Futures even in confinement/ Healing and action agendas
Chapter IV: Doing Our Time on the Outside
Prison families
Re-Entry, probation, and parole
Chapter V: The Light on the Opposite Shore
We ask you to spend a couple of weeks experiencing the stories that accompany Chapter I, Part B on preparing for the workshop, returning to them multiple times as you begin to catalog how to use them in your teaching.
Videos and audio recordings made by Herstory facilitators will guide you.
We have set up a group of simple exercises following each story that you can download to allow you to record your responses, as you move from preparing to teaching your first workshop. Your answers are only for you.
You can use your reflections as starting places for future writings. You can use them as crib notes when you return to using these stories in your teaching. Or you can use them to guide individual writers when parallel stories come up.
Along the way you will find many resources, including:
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Short videos and audios about using the Herstory tools in carceral settings, with corresponding stories to inspire your writing circle.
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A gallery of stories to draw on whenever you wish. These are stories collected from Herstory’s work behind bars over an 18-year period, and from people in reentry and prison families.
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Pop up reflection documents that you can download and use for your own preparation and as you conduct the workshops
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Reading and listening exercises and downloadable worksheets
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A crib sheet of essential questions to get writers started
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A menu for teaching the Page One Moment and planning your first workshop day.
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A selection of articles about witnessing through Memoir in Carceral settings and working with more serious trauma
We have set up this curriculum so that it can be used with one or two people or with a large group of 25 people or more.
Depending on how and where you create your writing circle, whether it is taking place in person or via zoom, with real life interference and faulty video connections, it may be as formal as mandated by the staff of the prison or jail where you are working, with participants called down every week by the corrections officers, and corrections officers attending every word. Or it may be completely informal, as you work with people whenever they are able to meet you.
A NOTE ON REPETITION
26 years ago, Pat Gorman, a Native American writer, articulated what she was experiencing in Herstory by comparing our work with oral imaging to what goes on in a drumming circle, where each participant picks up the drumbeat, like a heartbeat, each building on what the other has said in order to shape the piece of writing hidden deep inside.
To image aloud what goes on in our most secret hearts is something that we don't normally do before an audience, which is the magic and power of the way we have learned to work.
With our mixture of videos, stories, exercises and reflections, we have tried to replicate the kind of repetition that goes on with in-person training, as much as this is possible to do online. We like to think of it as a spiral, so that when you move through the key sequences of oral imagining– the movement from introducing yourself into helping each participant into image aloud what would would happen if their words had the power to finding your page one movements, each time that the material seems to repeat itself, you will become more accustomed to the constructs that guide this work.
Feel free to take this work at any pace that feels right, and to skip the downloadable reflections, or to use our back arrows to return to earlier parts of the curriculum where concepts are first introduced, playing favorite videos over and over again.
We are all voyagers together, adding and changing as we go.